"I have no data beyond my own difficulties in getting people, but I can shake a tree and get ASP devs to rain down upon me, but PHP devs are much harder to find"
Fair enough. OTOH, any decent developer can sit down with a couple of PHP books (I recommend Julie Meloni's _PHP Essentials_ to start with, then the SAMS _PHP Developer's Cookbook_ and _PHP Developer's Dictionary_) and become a competent PHP programmer with a couple of weeks' work. The same is not true of ASP, which is a really horrible language. (If, in fact, it's even correct to call it a "language" in the same way as PHP, Perl, C, etc.) That same developer may be turning out some kind of ASP apps within that same couple of weeks, but the PHP apps will be much faster, more reliable, and all-around useful. Getting useful ASP apps takes much longer -- by which time the PHP apps will be not only useful, but beautifully written and easy to maintain and blazingly fast, which the ASP apps _never_ will by the very nature of the beast.
GMAFB. This isn't US-bashing, it's US-government-bashing -- and despite having spent most of my adult working life taking Uncle Sam's money (I used to do it directly, now I work for a company that gets most of its revenue, indirectly, from gov't grants) I have to say that the government richly deserves bashing when it comes to protection of free speech on line. Congress, the White House, and the courts are all, to a greater or lesser degree, happy to take away your rights to free speech when a computer is involved, if it's politically expedient to do so; the courts are somewhat better than the first to, but not by much.
And why is it politically expedient? Because We The People demand that freedom be taken away... so yeah, maybe it's US-bashing after all. But if so, it's very accurate bashing. And that's sad.
"Also, it's complete crap that MS came out of this looking good. It was another high-publicity security hole for one of their systems."
You know that and I know that, but what Joe Newspapereader knows is that an "Internet virus" was stopped by "Microsoft security." Joe N. doesn't know that a relatively small portion of the Net is run by Microsoft servers, and that only those servers are affected, and that the total effect on the Net even if every M$ server in the world stopped working at once would be minimal. Joe N. knows "Virus bad, Microsoft good."
Also as a professional Web developer -- fuck off and die, Microsoft lackey. We need more and better browsers because we don't need Microsoft (or anyone else) to take over the Web. As for incompatibility... do you know what the word "standards" means? If there's incompatibility, it's due almost entirely to your beloved IE, not the open-source and standards-compliant Mozilla.
With the possible exception of my text editor, I use my browser more than any other application on my machine. "Don't need?" What the hell kind of developer are you? Oh, wait a minute, maybe you're one of those people who slaps together slow, buggy code in FrontPage and calls himself a "Web developer," when in fact you wouldn't know good HTML if it bit you in the ass.
I'm as anti-RIAA and pro-(the-way-it-used-to-be)-Napster as anyone, but I think compulsory licensing in any venue is a terrible idea. This is entirely the wrong target. The right target, of course, would be the RIAA's monopoly power over the music industry. Regulating monopolies just never seems to work -- e.g. Microsoft and its cheerful violation of previous consent decrees. The only way to deal with a monopoly is to break it up.
Specificity and power are the keys here. First, design the nanites so they go after very specific species of bacteria rather than against bacteria in general. Second, make them overwhelmingly powerful so the "bad" bacteria don't have a chance to evolve resistance. If we get good enough at that sort of design, the bacteria will no more evolve into resistant strains than humans can evolve resistance to a sniper's bullet in the back of the head.
I have reasonable hopes that the day isn't too far off when we'll be able to custom-produce drugs which not only go after specific pathogens, but also work with patients' specific biochemistries. Pharmacies will no longer stock drugs; instead they'll be drug factories which, given the lab workup on a patient, can turn out exactly the right medicine for the patient _and_ the disease within a few hours. My guess is that disease-specific meds are five years off, disease-and-patient-specific meds are about fifteen years off.
Yes, it is a stupid name. They ought to call it the "Light Scalpel(tm)" or the "Light Knife(tm)" or something like that. I think the implied link to Star Wars' lightsabers would still be clear enough, but nobody would have to sue anybody, and it would sound a lot more appropriate in the ears of surgeons and patients.
Actually, as a teenager, I played a lot of video games (back in _my_ day, we had to walk _three blocks_ down to the 7-11 and put _quarters_ in the games to play them, you kids these days don't know how good you have it mutter grumble...) and also trained quite seriously in Tae Kwon Do. A fair number of my gamer-geek friends did the same. (And the expression on the jocks' faces when they realized we weren't their punching bags any more... but that's another story.) I would have _loved_ to have had a device like this, both for recreation and for training. Hell, it might even start me gaming again, if I ever have the time.
"MS really does know what people want (after spending $$$millions on usability testing), and they give it to them..."
This argument (which I've read many times before) would be a lot more convincing if MS products were, in fact, particularly usable. Which they're not. Much, much smaller companies than MS, with much smaller R&D budgets, have come up with much more usable products than MS has for just about every imaginable application.
"I like Linux as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure Linux is ready for my family to use."
Well, it's getting there, but you're probably right; it's not quite ready yet. OTOH, there are certainly products out there which will perform much better for the average consumer than anything Microsoft puts out. See, there's this company called Apple...
"Hmm first line managers maybe, but ultimately managers have to manage areas they have limited understanding of. The higher up you go the less you need to know of the technical details. If this wasn't the case - you'd never be able to have very large organisations - no-one can understand all the different disciplines to that level of detail."
In principle this is true, but there's an important qualifier. Managers have to know something about _something_ -- e.g. someone managing a project comprising scientists, engineers, and programmers need not be a scientist and an engineer and a programmer all at once (a hell of a combination) but should be, at the very least, a scientist or a manager or a programmer by training, and have done such a job once upon a time. As opposed to a trained "manager" with a business school degree and a resume full of jargon who knows jack shit about science or engineering or programming or, for that matter, just about anytbing in the real world at all.
Didn't Microsoft argue in the original trial that IE was an inextricable part of Windows -- i.e., that it was commingled -- even though several people have shown that it can be removed with a bit of hacking? So either there was illegal commingling, or the M$ people who testified that it was commingled committed perjury and should be sent to prison. M$ really can't win with this one.
Well, okay, they can win, but only if they have a court that's extremely biased in their favor and is willing to overlook this blatantly illegal behavior. Which, unfortunately, it looks like they do.
Of course, for a long time, any space colonies will actually be more vulnerable to bio-attack -- think about closed air-recirculation systems, small and relatively homogenous populations, limited access to medical resources... In the long run, this may be a partial solution, but for the short term, what we mainly need is better methods for identifying and counteracting infectious outbreaks, be they natural or man-made, wherever they occur.
Sheer stupidity, such as the baseless and wholly unscientific hysteria about anthrax vaccine in the military, sure doesn't help. I'm just old enough that when I joined the Army, we were still vaccinated against smallpox. This was in 1987; I think they stopped smallpox vaccinations, except for personnel assigned to certain high-risk areas, just a couple of years later. I know I didn't get the vaccination when I switched to the Air Force in 1989. That was a rather unpleasant vaccination, with some potentially nasty side-effects... but I would a million times rather have to deal with the vaccination than with the disease itself. Similarly, when we deployed for Desert Storm, I was more than happy to let them punch me full of holes for vaccinations against every bio-agent the Iraqis might possibly have had. Similarly, any parents who refuse to get their kids vaccinated because of something some wacko says on TV are guilty of child abuse, as far as I'm concerned -- and they're potentially abusing not only their own children, but their whole communities' children.
Given the rapid pace of biotech advances, I'm reasonably hopeful that within the next few years, it may be possible to develop disease-specific (and maybe even patient-specific) antibiotics and antivirals in a matter of weeks or days, rather than the years it currently takes. But we're not there yet.
"According to the count, George W Bush won the vote in florida,"
Change one letter in one word of that sentence, and you'd be correct: "According to the court..." The Florida Supreme Court tried to order a fair and accurate vote count; the U.S. S.C. prevented it. It was quite possibly the worst S.C. decision since Dred Scott.
Um, you expect the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn this? The same Supreme Court that showed its utter contempt for the American people by overturning the results of the 2000 Presidential election? The S.C. is just as much a political animal as Congress or the White House these days, I'm afraid, perhaps more so. Best bet is for the Mass. legislature to rewrite the law, because buddy, the right-wing S.C. doesn't give a good goddamn about individual rights -- especially, although not exclusively, where encounters with law enforcement are concerned.
Usual biotech-speak is "sequencing" and "mapping," the latter being figuring out which genes are where in the raw sequence data (AGCCTGATC...) which comes from the former.
"Decoding" is a useful but too-broad term; it covers mapping and everything that comes afterward, such as figuring which of the mapped genes will express when, and to what degree, and how the proteins thus expressed will fold, and how they'll interact with each other. Once you've got all that, you have Mastered The Secrets Of Life Itself.
There is, to put it mildly, a lot of work to be done here. Job security for bioinformaticians.
Well, besides the obvious answer, that without the space program none of the technology that allows this conversation would be here... The computer revolution is directly attributable to NASA's demands for computing power during the Apollo program.
But if that doesn't interest you (i.e., if you're one of those Luddite hypocrites who seem to delight in using Slashdot to denounce technology) try this on for size. If you've been to a hospital at any time during the last ~30 years, you've benfited from the space program -- where do you think all that nifty medical technology came from in the first place?. If you drive a car, you've benefited in ways too numerous to count. If you live anywhere where there's a risk of severe weather, you've benefited, because modern weather forecasting and storm-warning systems simply would not exist without NASA.
Future benefits: space has a lot of room, a lot of raw materials (many asteroids are mountain-size chunks of high-grade ore), no ecology to screw up, and (effectively) zero-gee. This is the perfect combination for making damn near anything we want to, including many things we can't make at all on earth (aerogel, anyone?) without further fucking up the surface of our planet. And biotech works very well in zero-gee for all kinds of reasons, which means we may get a cure for AIDS faster in orbit than we will down here. And cancer, and diabetes, and heart disease, and Alzheimer's, and...
Of course, for the Luddites, none of this matters. To them, space is a waste of time, nuclear power is eeevil, and the combination is anathema. They'll happily reap the benefits of space exploration, without ever knowing or acknowledging that they're doing so, while fighting it tooth and nail.
"however they really haven't screwed over the consumers..."
When I can't buy a good product at a good price because some asshole monopolist destroyed the good product / good price options and is leaving me with my only choice as a shitty product at a mediocre price...
... to contrast this story with the one immediately preceding it, an announcement of a Q&A with IBM's director of Linux marketing. Once again, the revolution gets hijacked.
Even weirder and scarier is that I generally think of IBM being in the Linux business as a good thing. Wintel, Inc. may no longer be the monolith it once was, but it's still so big and dangerous that companies like IBM (and Sun, and Oracle, and Apple, and AOL) seem like allies to the little guy by comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty ironic question coming from an AC.
"I have no data beyond my own difficulties in getting people, but I can shake a tree and get ASP devs to rain down upon me, but PHP devs are much harder to find"
:)
Fair enough. OTOH, any decent developer can sit down with a couple of PHP books (I recommend Julie Meloni's _PHP Essentials_ to start with, then the SAMS _PHP Developer's Cookbook_ and _PHP Developer's Dictionary_) and become a competent PHP programmer with a couple of weeks' work. The same is not true of ASP, which is a really horrible language. (If, in fact, it's even correct to call it a "language" in the same way as PHP, Perl, C, etc.) That same developer may be turning out some kind of ASP apps within that same couple of weeks, but the PHP apps will be much faster, more reliable, and all-around useful. Getting useful ASP apps takes much longer -- by which time the PHP apps will be not only useful, but beautifully written and easy to maintain and blazingly fast, which the ASP apps _never_ will by the very nature of the beast.
"(caveat: I work near Redmond)."
That probably has something to do with it.
GMAFB. This isn't US-bashing, it's US-government-bashing -- and despite having spent most of my adult working life taking Uncle Sam's money (I used to do it directly, now I work for a company that gets most of its revenue, indirectly, from gov't grants) I have to say that the government richly deserves bashing when it comes to protection of free speech on line. Congress, the White House, and the courts are all, to a greater or lesser degree, happy to take away your rights to free speech when a computer is involved, if it's politically expedient to do so; the courts are somewhat better than the first to, but not by much.
... so yeah, maybe it's US-bashing after all. But if so, it's very accurate bashing. And that's sad.
And why is it politically expedient? Because We The People demand that freedom be taken away
"Also, it's complete crap that MS came out of this looking good. It was another high-publicity security hole for one of their systems."
You know that and I know that, but what Joe Newspapereader knows is that an "Internet virus" was stopped by "Microsoft security." Joe N. doesn't know that a relatively small portion of the Net is run by Microsoft servers, and that only those servers are affected, and that the total effect on the Net even if every M$ server in the world stopped working at once would be minimal. Joe N. knows "Virus bad, Microsoft good."
Also as a professional Web developer -- fuck off and die, Microsoft lackey. We need more and better browsers because we don't need Microsoft (or anyone else) to take over the Web. As for incompatibility ... do you know what the word "standards" means? If there's incompatibility, it's due almost entirely to your beloved IE, not the open-source and standards-compliant Mozilla.
With the possible exception of my text editor, I use my browser more than any other application on my machine. "Don't need?" What the hell kind of developer are you? Oh, wait a minute, maybe you're one of those people who slaps together slow, buggy code in FrontPage and calls himself a "Web developer," when in fact you wouldn't know good HTML if it bit you in the ass.
I'm as anti-RIAA and pro-(the-way-it-used-to-be)-Napster as anyone, but I think compulsory licensing in any venue is a terrible idea. This is entirely the wrong target. The right target, of course, would be the RIAA's monopoly power over the music industry. Regulating monopolies just never seems to work -- e.g. Microsoft and its cheerful violation of previous consent decrees. The only way to deal with a monopoly is to break it up.
Specificity and power are the keys here. First, design the nanites so they go after very specific species of bacteria rather than against bacteria in general. Second, make them overwhelmingly powerful so the "bad" bacteria don't have a chance to evolve resistance. If we get good enough at that sort of design, the bacteria will no more evolve into resistant strains than humans can evolve resistance to a sniper's bullet in the back of the head.
I have reasonable hopes that the day isn't too far off when we'll be able to custom-produce drugs which not only go after specific pathogens, but also work with patients' specific biochemistries. Pharmacies will no longer stock drugs; instead they'll be drug factories which, given the lab workup on a patient, can turn out exactly the right medicine for the patient _and_ the disease within a few hours. My guess is that disease-specific meds are five years off, disease-and-patient-specific meds are about fifteen years off.
IIRC, Pons and Fleischmann were chemists.
Yes, it is a stupid name. They ought to call it the "Light Scalpel(tm)" or the "Light Knife(tm)" or something like that. I think the implied link to Star Wars' lightsabers would still be clear enough, but nobody would have to sue anybody, and it would sound a lot more appropriate in the ears of surgeons and patients.
Actually, as a teenager, I played a lot of video games (back in _my_ day, we had to walk _three blocks_ down to the 7-11 and put _quarters_ in the games to play them, you kids these days don't know how good you have it mutter grumble ...) and also trained quite seriously in Tae Kwon Do. A fair number of my gamer-geek friends did the same. (And the expression on the jocks' faces when they realized we weren't their punching bags any more ... but that's another story.) I would have _loved_ to have had a device like this, both for recreation and for training. Hell, it might even start me gaming again, if I ever have the time.
That's why I said "almost."
"MS really does know what people want (after spending $$$millions on usability testing), and they give it to them ..."
...
This argument (which I've read many times before) would be a lot more convincing if MS products were, in fact, particularly usable. Which they're not. Much, much smaller companies than MS, with much smaller R&D budgets, have come up with much more usable products than MS has for just about every imaginable application.
"I like Linux as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure Linux is ready for my family to use."
Well, it's getting there, but you're probably right; it's not quite ready yet. OTOH, there are certainly products out there which will perform much better for the average consumer than anything Microsoft puts out. See, there's this company called Apple
... they'd get almost as much functionality as the TRS-80, plus Solitaire!
If you don't understand how space news is "stuff that matters" ... [Wanders off, shaking head]
"Hmm first line managers maybe, but ultimately managers have to manage areas they have limited understanding of. The higher up you go the less you need to know of the technical details. If this wasn't the case - you'd never be able to have very large organisations - no-one can understand all the different disciplines to that level of detail."
In principle this is true, but there's an important qualifier. Managers have to know something about _something_ -- e.g. someone managing a project comprising scientists, engineers, and programmers need not be a scientist and an engineer and a programmer all at once (a hell of a combination) but should be, at the very least, a scientist or a manager or a programmer by training, and have done such a job once upon a time. As opposed to a trained "manager" with a business school degree and a resume full of jargon who knows jack shit about science or engineering or programming or, for that matter, just about anytbing in the real world at all.
Didn't Microsoft argue in the original trial that IE was an inextricable part of Windows -- i.e., that it was commingled -- even though several people have shown that it can be removed with a bit of hacking? So either there was illegal commingling, or the M$ people who testified that it was commingled committed perjury and should be sent to prison. M$ really can't win with this one.
Well, okay, they can win, but only if they have a court that's extremely biased in their favor and is willing to overlook this blatantly illegal behavior. Which, unfortunately, it looks like they do.
Of course, for a long time, any space colonies will actually be more vulnerable to bio-attack -- think about closed air-recirculation systems, small and relatively homogenous populations, limited access to medical resources ... In the long run, this may be a partial solution, but for the short term, what we mainly need is better methods for identifying and counteracting infectious outbreaks, be they natural or man-made, wherever they occur.
... but I would a million times rather have to deal with the vaccination than with the disease itself. Similarly, when we deployed for Desert Storm, I was more than happy to let them punch me full of holes for vaccinations against every bio-agent the Iraqis might possibly have had. Similarly, any parents who refuse to get their kids vaccinated because of something some wacko says on TV are guilty of child abuse, as far as I'm concerned -- and they're potentially abusing not only their own children, but their whole communities' children.
Sheer stupidity, such as the baseless and wholly unscientific hysteria about anthrax vaccine in the military, sure doesn't help. I'm just old enough that when I joined the Army, we were still vaccinated against smallpox. This was in 1987; I think they stopped smallpox vaccinations, except for personnel assigned to certain high-risk areas, just a couple of years later. I know I didn't get the vaccination when I switched to the Air Force in 1989. That was a rather unpleasant vaccination, with some potentially nasty side-effects
Given the rapid pace of biotech advances, I'm reasonably hopeful that within the next few years, it may be possible to develop disease-specific (and maybe even patient-specific) antibiotics and antivirals in a matter of weeks or days, rather than the years it currently takes. But we're not there yet.
"According to the count, George W Bush won the vote in florida,"
..." The Florida Supreme Court tried to order a fair and accurate vote count; the U.S. S.C. prevented it. It was quite possibly the worst S.C. decision since Dred Scott.
Change one letter in one word of that sentence, and you'd be correct: "According to the court
Um, you expect the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn this? The same Supreme Court that showed its utter contempt for the American people by overturning the results of the 2000 Presidential election? The S.C. is just as much a political animal as Congress or the White House these days, I'm afraid, perhaps more so. Best bet is for the Mass. legislature to rewrite the law, because buddy, the right-wing S.C. doesn't give a good goddamn about individual rights -- especially, although not exclusively, where encounters with law enforcement are concerned.
I'm not too impressed by someone who trashes MySQL in comparison to PostrgeSQL, and can't be bothered to spell "PostgreSQL" right ...
Usual biotech-speak is "sequencing" and "mapping," the latter being figuring out which genes are where in the raw sequence data (AGCCTGATC ...) which comes from the former.
"Decoding" is a useful but too-broad term; it covers mapping and everything that comes afterward, such as figuring which of the mapped genes will express when, and to what degree, and how the proteins thus expressed will fold, and how they'll interact with each other. Once you've got all that, you have Mastered The Secrets Of Life Itself.
There is, to put it mildly, a lot of work to be done here. Job security for bioinformaticians.
Well, besides the obvious answer, that without the space program none of the technology that allows this conversation would be here ... The computer revolution is directly attributable to NASA's demands for computing power during the Apollo program.
...
But if that doesn't interest you (i.e., if you're one of those Luddite hypocrites who seem to delight in using Slashdot to denounce technology) try this on for size. If you've been to a hospital at any time during the last ~30 years, you've benfited from the space program -- where do you think all that nifty medical technology came from in the first place?. If you drive a car, you've benefited in ways too numerous to count. If you live anywhere where there's a risk of severe weather, you've benefited, because modern weather forecasting and storm-warning systems simply would not exist without NASA.
Future benefits: space has a lot of room, a lot of raw materials (many asteroids are mountain-size chunks of high-grade ore), no ecology to screw up, and (effectively) zero-gee. This is the perfect combination for making damn near anything we want to, including many things we can't make at all on earth (aerogel, anyone?) without further fucking up the surface of our planet. And biotech works very well in zero-gee for all kinds of reasons, which means we may get a cure for AIDS faster in orbit than we will down here. And cancer, and diabetes, and heart disease, and Alzheimer's, and
Of course, for the Luddites, none of this matters. To them, space is a waste of time, nuclear power is eeevil, and the combination is anathema. They'll happily reap the benefits of space exploration, without ever knowing or acknowledging that they're doing so, while fighting it tooth and nail.
"however they really haven't screwed over the consumers..."
...
When I can't buy a good product at a good price because some asshole monopolist destroyed the good product / good price options and is leaving me with my only choice as a shitty product at a mediocre price
... well, as a consumer, I feel pretty screwed.
LOL!
... to contrast this story with the one immediately preceding it, an announcement of a Q&A with IBM's director of Linux marketing. Once again, the revolution gets hijacked.
Even weirder and scarier is that I generally think of IBM being in the Linux business as a good thing. Wintel, Inc. may no longer be the monolith it once was, but it's still so big and dangerous that companies like IBM (and Sun, and Oracle, and Apple, and AOL) seem like allies to the little guy by comparison.